


Last call somewhere in the world

by vaguely_concerned



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-06
Updated: 2013-10-06
Packaged: 2017-12-28 15:23:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/993498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaguely_concerned/pseuds/vaguely_concerned
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short drabbles describing the last natural dreams of Ariadne, Arthur and Eames. Implied Arthur/Eames and mild Ariadne/Arthur/Eames.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last call somewhere in the world

Ariadne’s last natural dream is one of wistfulness; it’s about the ending of childhoods.

 

She dreams of a giant structure built like mangled ribs curving into each other, walls smooth and white and unblemished. It isn’t a labyrinth, or if it is, it isn’t for her. She walks straight through it, stepping through the streaks of sunlight washing through the slits between the bone pillars.

In the centre there’s a sandbox, mile upon mile of softly curving dunes under an open blue sky.

The walls curve around it, built like an amphitheatre. It smells like spring in there.

 

A child is playing with a spade and bucket, dark head tucked in like the breath before a comma in the great big silence of the sand. It takes Ariadne fifteen minutes to walk over to where it’s sitting, distances shifting and tensing in the dreamscape.

 

“What are you making?” she asks the child. Before the face turns up she knows that it’s herself, kid nose upturned and stubby, knees muddy and bruised like all the best late summer evenings.

 

“Dunno yet,” Little Ariadne says. “You want to join in?”

 

“Sure,” Ariadne says, crouching down and taking a rake.

 

Up on the tribune is her father, looking another way.

 

Cobb is there too, blond hair a blur in the shadows. He’s holding a red thread in his hand. The red thread is unravelling from Ariadne’s clothes like kite string. She tries to tug on it but he doesn’t notice. Then she shrugs off her red hoodie and starts making a pile of sand next to Little Ariadne’s.

 

“Are you digging for minotaur skulls, cherie?” asks a woman’s voice from behind her, light and smiling and tinged with French.

Mal is wearing the purple dress Cobb's mind had her die in, dark hair curling in around her face. Her dimples punctuate that smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. A pair of high-heeled shoes dangles from dainty fingers.

 

“Maybe,” Ariadne says. “But just so you know, you are somebody else’s.”

 

A grin cracks over her face in a way that gives her away, because there hadn’t been enough left of her in Cobb’s mind for a smile like that. She laughs, and between one breath and the next it’s Eames standing there, hand in his pocket, rocking on his heels.

 

“Good to hear,” he says, taking a pull of a cigarette and letting the smoke back out in slow insidious coils spiralling up towards a sky that is suddenly grey and heavy with thunder, as if he brought it with him, smoking the world into storm. The stretch of his mouth as he still chuckles a little is probably outlawed in more conservative corners of the world.

 

She knows he’s only a dream because he’s not all that much like the real Eames. In reality Eames is a highly intelligent, highly dysfunctional man with a weirdly fluctuating sense of self, a potential mood disorder and the unstoppable compulsion to, as it were, lift the world’s wallet in increasingly sensational ways to see if it’ll notice.

 

In reality Eames is someone you see only when he’d like you to, and he exists only in the gaps between other people, and one day it’s going to kill him.

 

In dreams Eames is a work of art in the most basic sense; created.

 

He sits down on one of Little Ariadne’s upturned buckets, taking a drag of his cigarette. Eames doesn’t smoke topside anymore - if he did, Arthur would quickly have launched a campaign against it that would leave the most despotic landlord to shame. He still looks like the kind of man who smokes, though.

 

A wind comes rattling in through the gaping ribs of the complex, bringing with it soft silk warmth and the absence of smell. The Ariadnes make a sandcastle, and then another, and then a sand city around them, clapping tight and finishing in concentric circles, moving out from the city center to suburbs, carving out empty canals for dried-up rivers. Little Ariadne is better with the visions, Ariadne knows how much of that vision can survive being written out in sand.

 

They work well together, though Ariadne gets the sense that the younger her doesn’t trust her much. She keeps darting looks up towards her father’s profile.

 

For all Ariadne knows that profile is just waiting for his new wife and her (their) kids to come back with popcorn and soda, and he hasn’t even noticed her.

 

Dream-Eames finishes his cigarette, a dog end Ariadne had hitherto expected to last forever in cheerful defiance of physics, and throws the stub into the sand, grinding it out with his heel. Little Ariadne gives him a dirty look.

 

“Sorry, love,” Eames says, pushing some sand over the cigarette end with his shoe. He doesn’t speak like that topside.

 

Ariadne makes some whirls in the sand with the rake before she has to ask him: “What are you doing here?”

 

“That’s up to you, isn’t it,” Eames says, shrugging.

 

The sand is warm to the touch; Ariadne gazes out over the dunes and has a twist of impulse in her stomach.

 

She throws him a tiny plastic spade. “Start digging,” she says. Since it’s her dream, he takes it without protest.

 

Time doesn’t matter in dreams, the same way logic doesn’t; when she blinks aware next the sand is nearly all cleared away.

 

It takes a while for her to see it, and when she does it rolls in over her all at once. The floor is divided into squares, patches of dark and light; a giant chess board without any pieces. Only the light squares aren’t really light, they’re mirrors reflecting the sky above them. And maybe the sky is a mirror now too; Eames has a tendency to bring mirrors to where she doesn’t like to find them, startling her with the reflection of her own pale young face.

 

“Do you reckon this is a Freudian kind of dream, or are you more of a Jung fan?” Eames asks. “Because if I’m your Id, you don’t have much of a carnal side.”

 

“Maybe there’s just nothing in here I want,” Ariadne says, watching the tribunes. Then she looks at this place again. Without the sand city and her own creation spiralling out under her hand there really is nothing for her here.

 

“Why d’you keep a chain in your breast pocket?” Little Ariadne asks Eames suspiciously.

 

“Because there are some things you can’t afford to have stolen,” he tells her. Then, after a beat: “And sometimes it’s a bit too tempting to just get rid of it.”

 

Eames scares Ariadne in a multitude of little ways and this is one of them. A self that could be so easily, carelessly discarded seems like the highest form of torture to carry around, even when you’re doing it to yourself.

 

“Hi,” she tells Little Ariadne, “you wanna go get some ice cream?”

 

Little Ariadne gives this some thought. “Strawberry and chocolate?”

 

“Sure,” Ariadne says, eyes fixed on her father, on Cobb, still pulling at red string with no connection in the other end. “Whatever you’d like. Let’s get out of here.”

 

They walk away - never getting lost because if this a labyrinth, it’s not for her - as Ariadne builds a city around them riddled with paradoxes like Arthur has taught her and Eames smiles at that.

 

She leaves Little Ariadne with an ice cream cone as big as her head, sitting with her feet dangling on a park bench beside Eames, who is glancing at the crowd as if he’s waiting for someone.

 

As she walks away Ariadne hears Eames ask: “What are you making?”, and Little Ariadne says “Dunno yet. Something awesome,” and Ariadne ducks her head and thinks, good.

 

She wakes to the fading taste of strawberry ice cream on her tongue, milky sweet and slightly artificial, and all in all that seems right.

 

———————————————————————————-

 

Arthur’s last dream is about his mother.

He has it about six months into the Somnacin project. He dreams of that time he came home after getting really drunk for the first time, skin buzzing with alcohol and the discontentment of youth, knowing you’re not yet precise enough, unmoulded still and all potential.

 

His mother used to have a vase that she’d inherited from her mom in turn, gently flower-patterned and innocuously delicate; it wasn’t even a particularly nice vase, as far as Arthur was concerned.

 

It was the most cherished object in their home.

 

He’d knocked it down from the shelf on his way in, his limbs misty and foreign with alcohol, leaving shards like seashells spilled on his mother’s meticulously clean carpet. Arthur had tried to glue the pieces back together, hiding the shards in his closet. It was the first time he realized that he was better at picking things to pieces than he was at putting them together.

 

She never asked him, and he never told her, but the empty space on the shelf screamed all the metaphors in the world into the places between them and then he had left.

 

In his dream he had been standing, barefoot, on his mother’s floor, looking down at the cracked eggshells that were once a gesture carried from mother to daughter, and he knew that after weeks and weeks of dreaming only of blood and mud and broken men, this would be his last.

 

In the way of dream logic he had looked at the broken vase and known, suddenly and unflinchingly, exactly how to fix it - only to find he no longer cared enough to do it.

 

His mother’s steps out in the hallway, her voice calling for him, and he’d woken up and not gone to sleep again for two days straight.

 

———————————————————————————-

 

In dreams the narratives have their own kind of gravity; even a stranger will be pulled into your old orbits, unwitting of what ghost they have just assumed the mantle of. It takes skill to move within someone else’s mind entirely as yourself. It takes even more skill to let yourself drift with the story until you need to break it, so ingrained in someone else that strength is needed to pull apart.

 

In Eames’s last dream his given name falls off him in tiny whispers, melting off his skin like the first kisses of snowflakes in the autumn, and it feels right, it feels like being unmoored, it feels like finally keeping so many people under his skin that he can blend into the crowd and disappear.


End file.
